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Monday, July 21, 2003

Race Based Improv!

I really, really want to redesign my site right now. Today I started working on the redesign of Kingland’s website and if only I could start mine over from scratch again. There are so many things that I would change. First, the layout would be a little more refined. The icons on the left wouldn’t be as blah as they are. The quote generator at the top would be revamped (I might do this soon anyways if I have the ambition to program a perl or javascript styled generator—the java applet I have is kind of bloated). The main body of my page would have more flair and all in all I’d add a lot of style to this site. As it is, I guess it’ll do.

It’s so nice to be doing some work with photoshop. I’ve never done too much work with it, but I’ve always wanted to learn and now I’m getting a change to work with it in redesigning the entire Kingland site. It’s going to be way spiffy when I get it done (which may be the end of the summer the way it’s looking. I have vacation for a little over a week starting Thursday and then when I get back I only have three weeks and I don’t know if I’ll be able to dedicate all of my time to doing the web site. We’ll have to see how things go.

Now on a different subject, it turns out that St. John’s will be giving me NO aid this next year financially. Not a single damn penny. You think they’d at least be able to give me a little bit of something considering I’ve paid for my last 4 years of schooling, but no, since I’m there after my allotted 4 years I get nothing. So I’m going to need money this semester and this winter more than ever. All of my money that I’m making this summer is already going towards school and I’ll hopefully keep some hours doing web work for Kingland while I’m at school as well. I have my job on campus at the prep school again, but that never amounts to too much money considering I get paid less than seven dollars an hour and I only get like 10 or 12 hours a week tops. So if you want to make a monetary contribution to me or this site, you are more than welcome to.

This weekend was a good, semi-lazy weekend for me. The only non-lazy part of the weekend was doing chores and our improv show on Friday night. Speaking of our show, I’m sorry to anyone who saw it for two reasons. 1.) I think this was one of our worst shows ever and 2.) I managed to create a very, uhhh, awkward scene. Let me tell you how this came about.

We were doing our long form section of the show for the night and this usually consists of a scene starting from the audience’s inspiration and then we base scenes on the scenes that came before. So the scene at the moment involved someone who had a person who did everything they told them and another person wondering how they could get someone to do everything for them. Thinking that I’d be clever I started a new scene where the first words of the scene were “Hey, Bob, check it out. This books tells you how you can get your own personal slave in 30 days.” Now this wouldn’t really be a bad thing……except that Pete, the only black person in our group, stepped forward to be Bob. I could hear the crowd half laughing hysterically and half gasping. From that reaction, I knew that Pete must have been the person to come on stage to be Bob even before I turned to look. Well, yeah, we stood there dumbfounded for a few seconds and then, thankfully, someone started a new scene.

I felt so bad after that scene. I had no intention of making the scene have a racist edge, but my not thinking enough about what could happen in that scene led to it being a little awkward. Thank goodness no one was really offended. Well, I’ll have two weeks off from improv now to think up some new ideas for scenes that don’t include racism. It’ll be odd to not have to go to improv practice or be in shows for the next two weeks, but it’ll be nice to actually have some nights to myself instead of being in Rochester for the entire day. Anyhow, I’m going to go back to playing with photoshop now. I still want to redesign this site, especially after I saw my roommate’s new site.